Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Cod in Cleveland Ohio.
She's one of 77 Gatos built. This is SS-224.
The history of the United States submarine fleet
is considered to have begun with U.S.S. Holland,
which was commissioned by the Navy in 1900.
Newspapers described her as a perfect weapon,
one that would help the navy to gain decisive superiority in naval battles.
The successful operations of German submarines during World War I
demonstrated the high efficiency of submarines,
and thus drastically changed the nature of naval warfare.
After the war,
the United States studied and adopted the experience gained from Europe
and began designing and building submarines
to operate in the Atlantic Ocean.
However, in the 1930s, the U.S. became more preoccupied
with growing geopolitical tensions in another part of the globe.
The fleet submarine was developed through the 1930s,
basically to combat the Japanese threat in the Pacific.
Before nuclear power, submarines are essentially surface ships
that can dive underwater for a short time, travel a short distance.
We're on the surface more than 95% of the time.
Well, the American fleet submarine early in the war is a slow-diving boat,
but eventually, with a well-trained crew,
the fleet submarine can get under completely in about 35 seconds.
“Clear the bridge, dive, dive!”.
The diving klaxon is fired twice,
the lookouts are dropping through the hatches,
take positions here in the control room at the bow and stern planes.
Using these controls, the boat will take a seven or eight degree down angle,
as the air vents at the tops of the ballast tanks are opened hydraulically.
The air rushes out, the rudder of course rushes in the flood ports on the bottom,
and down we go.
Specifications of U.S.S. Cod:
Length: more than 95 meters. Beam: 8.3 meters.
Mean draft: 5.3 meters. Displacement submerged: 2,424 tons.
In terms of her construction, this sub belongs to the double-hull type,
except for the aft end, which had a single-hull design.
Maximum diameter of the pressure hull: almost 5 meters.
The submarine is divided into 8 compartments:
First—forward torpedo room. Second—forward battery room.
Third—control room with conning tower on top of it.
Fourth—aft battery room. Fifth and sixth—engine rooms.
Seventh—electromechanical room. Eighth—aft torpedo room.
The Gatos are the last of what are called the “thin-skinned fleet boats”.
Our pressure hull is 9/16-inch thick mild steel.
For her primary power plant, Cod used four General Electric diesel engines,
with a total power output of 6,400 horsepower.
The American fleet submarine during World War II was incredibly loud.
The diesels, of course, they're called rock crushers for a reason.
So, on the surface they're very loud, but once a fleet submarine dives
and switches to its electric motors, it becomes incredibly quiet.
For her propulsion, the submarine used four electric engines
manufactured by General Electric, with an output of 2,740 horsepower.
On the surface, electric motors were supplied by diesel generators;
when submerged, they were powered by two sets of accumulator batteries,
each comprising 126 elements.
The batteries were charged by the same diesel generators
when the sub was on the surface.
Maximum speed: 21 knots surfaced, 9 knots submerged.
Range when surfaced: 11,000 nautical miles at 10 knots.
Endurance: 75 days. Operational depth: 90 meters.
But you can go deeper.
Captain Fluckey of the U.S.S. Barb
said that he had an arrangement with his stewards in the forward compartment.
They would let him know when the deck plates were buckling.
He calculated that the hydrostatic pressure
would compress the hull sufficiently
to buckle the deck plates at about 515 feet.
Not all captains were as confident as he was
in the engineering of the fleet boat.
I believe all submariners are heroes, but the heroes among the heroes
are the submariners who are going into combat in the thin-skinned fleet boats.
The first American submarine, U.S.S. Holland,
provided dreadful habitation for its crew of six people.
On early submarines, the attacks of enemy ships were no less dangerous
than the possibility of dying from being poisoned by toxic gases
produced by accumulator batteries or ammunition detonation.
That's why, as submarine construction developed, special attention was paid
to the creation of acceptable living and working conditions for the crew.
Only, of course, as long as it didn't have a negative impact
on the combat capabilities of the boat, which were defined by its purpose.
Gato-class submarines were designed
for lengthy combat missions in the Pacific Ocean, and their creators
tried to guarantee as much comfort as possible for their crews.
Here we are in the after battery of the boat.
US submarines were quite luxurious compared to other fleets,
such as the Japanese and the Germans.
We had the advantage of having air conditioning onboard.
Now, don't get the idea that it was very cool,
it was designed mostly to protect the electronic equipment onboard the boat.
Now we're heading into the rest of the after battery.
This is where all the guys got together for their social life,
this is where they came to eat their food, to do their studies,
in general, just to hang out,
cos there was nowhere else inside the boat that they could go.
Often, they would show movies in here, and you have to consider,
this was quite cramped as you can see, there's only room for 24 guys at a time.
With 97 guys onboard to feed,
there was quite a turnover in guys at the tables here.
Initially, each sailor on Cod had his own place to sleep,
but with the introduction of new equipment and armament,
the number of people on board increased.
This resulted in additional berths being arranged
over racks of spare torpedoes in the forward and aft torpedo rooms.
War has some strange stories.
The Cod's second skipper, Caddie Atkins, was a very dedicated skipper.
He wanted to make sure that the Cod got as many sinkings as possible.
And to make sure that he was ready for action, he had the crew
put a mattress up in the conning tower both beside the periscopes.
And he would sleep up there at night,
so that if they encountered any Japanese ships
he could immediately get up and spring into action, and go into the attack.
Well, one night, while he was up there asleep, we picked up a three-ship convoy.
And he immediately got up and went into the attack.
And somewhere along the process of him calling out ranges
and bearings through the periscope,
the rest of the tracking party realized that he's up there naked.
Because it was in the tropics, and even though we had air conditioning,
nobody ever got chilly. He decided to sleep without any clothes.
So, someone suggested
that perhaps it would be decorum for him to put something on.
And so they called down, and the stewards mates
brought up a pair of striped pajamas for him to put on.
So, Captain Atkins, with his eyes still to the periscope,
was putting on his pajama bottoms, and then put on his top and buttoned it up,
so that he was properly dressed to sink these ships.
Now, no one thought anything of that, until 1998,
when the Cod crew held their very first reunion here in Cleveland.
And at the banquet, captain Atkins was in attendance,
and the crew presented him with a brand-new pair of striped pajamas.
Now, all the wives were just scratching their heads—
they had no idea why the crew would give their captain striped pajamas
and why everybody thought that was so funny.
Until it was explained to them, the story.
So today, on the Cod, if you stop by the captain's stateroom and look in,
on his bed is a pair of striped pajamas ready for the next attack.
Here we are in the forward engine room.
As you can see, behind me there are the distilling plants,
each capable of up to a thousand gallons of fresh water a day.
Very hot in this compartment,
the guys would dry their clothes, it could get up to 120 degrees.
These engines do not turn the propeller, instead they turn generators.
The noise in here was incredible,
there was no way to stand and have a conversation.
So, to operate the engine room, you had to use sign languages, lights and bells.
When the enemy was searching for you with sonar pings,
then of course everyone just became very quiet.
Machinery was shut down that wasn't needed, fans would have been shut down,
even the steering motor made noise, so you would switch to manual steering.
Now, without power steering,
the fleet submarines helm is going to require three men to turn it—
one at a time, after 10 or 12 revolutions you're tired,
the second man will take over, and then the third.
And hopefully, by the time he's tired,
the first man has caught his breath and come back and taken over the helm.
So, it's nice to have power steering, unless you have to be absolutely quiet.
The main advantage of a submarine over other ship types is her concealment.
For this reason, their use in naval warfare
was initially met with mixed attitudes:
some people believed that submarines were a cowardly weapon
for those who preferred sneaky and foul strikes to a face-to-face battle.
However, submarines were too effective and menacing to just give up on the idea.
Cod's main offensive weaponry consisted of ten 533-millimeter torpedo tubes.
Six of them were installed in the forward room and four—in the aft room.
The sub carried 24 torpedoes as ammunition.
Throughout her career, Cod was armed with:
Mark 14 steam-propelled torpedoes with a contact or magnetic detonator,
Mark 18 electric torpedoes, Mark 23 steam-propelled torpedoes.
What we're looking at now is the Mark 14 torpedo.
This has counter-rotating props, four separate rudders to control the steering,
and the upper and lower depth control.
All of that is controlled
by a gyroscope right here within the tail of the torpedo.
Forward of that we have the engine,
this is where you mixed together alcohol, water and air
to create the steam to drive this thing up to 50 mph under the water.
Forward here we also have the air flask, in this flask would be 3000 psi of air.
And forward of that is the business end of this torpedo—
this is where you would find 750 pounds of torpex explosive.
Early in the war, when these were equipped with the magnetic exploder,
we found that they were very ineffective.
The American Mark XIV torpedo has a secret magnetic detonator,
which, unfortunately, we didn't fully test properly.
They were prematurely detonating. What was happening is the torpedo
would encounter the magnetic field of the enemy ship and detonate too soon.
It took about two years for the Navy to admit
that the problem was the torpedoes, then identify and correct the solution.
And then it became a pretty good weapon.
Unlike modern submarines with a ram, on a World War II submarine
everything was done by muscle power and block-and-tackle, 3,000 pounds.
Load tube two.
Another downside of Mark 14 torpedoes
came as a result of their propulsion method.
The steam-gas mixture actuating the turbine was ejected outside,
and the torpedoes left a clear bubble trail as they propelled forward.
When the bubble trail began to be identified as a tactical disadvantage—
I mean, the enemy could locate the position of the submarine
by running down its bubble trail from the torpedo wakes—
we introduced an electric torpedo,
basically a copy of the German electric torpedo.
But the Mark XVIII electric torpedoes could be dangerous.
We were in the north end of the Formosa Straits, we were very busy,
we fired six of the eight torpedoes in the after room,
we had two electric torpedoes left.
A routine battery charge
was conducted by someone who didn't follow their training,
and hydrogen gas built up in the body of the torpedo,
and it exploded at the end of the battery charge
causing the two torpedo batteries to burn furiously,
in fact, they burned like road flares.
The crew were able to extinguish one of the burning torpedoes,
but the after torpedo room was filling with dense black smoke.
They had to abandon the compartment temporarily,
because the smoke masks they were using began to clog
from the heavy particulates of the burning torpedo battery case.
While this is happening, the captain sends two men running down the deck
to open the after torpedo room hatch to vent that dense black smoke.
And they’re washed overboard by a wave, it's night-time.
Meanwhile, back down in the room, a separate group of crewmen
have re-entered the compartment wearing self-contained breathing packs,
their job is to put the torpedo fully into the tube.
While they're working in completely black smoke,
they can't see anything, they have to work by sense of touch—
they realized that the torpex explosives in the warhead
have already begun to melt.
They are able to get the torpedo into the tube and they eject it
before it detonates. The seawater of course puts the fire out,
but if they had waited just seconds longer to get it out of the boat,
they probably would have lost the Cod.
So meanwhile, the men in the water, they have their own problem—
one of the two sailors can't swim.
And of course, while the crew gets the boat saved,
the captain orders everyone not on duty to come topside,
bring a flashlight, to help find the men in the water.
And the men coming topside realized the boat is lit up like a Christmas tree.
And of course, within a few minutes,
a plane is spotted on the radar coming straight for us.
Luckily, it turns out to be an American plane, but the captain
contacts the pilot only seconds before the pilot drops bombs on us.
So, we almost were destroyed a second time in about 15-20 minutes.
So, sadly, seven hours into the ordeal, and we're about to dive,
and we see one of the two men.
And we pull him aboard and he gives us the bad news
that his shipmate couldn't hold on any longer.
You know, they were seven hours in the water, and he drowned.
So, we lost one of our crewmen.
But that's life on a submarine in World War II.
You know, you have weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.